


SBURB Bureau of Investigation

by spacetimeCounselor



Category: Homestuck, Replay Value AU - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-15 17:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 15,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacetimeCounselor/pseuds/spacetimeCounselor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The game tries to kill everyone. We should really do something about that, shouldn't we?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Battle Against an Unfathomable Enemy

**Author's Note:**

> (SBI belongs to the Replay Value AU, based on GodsGiftToGrinds' SBURB Glitch Faq, which is itself based on Andrew Hussie's Homestuck, the spiritual successor to the acclaimed Dr. Brinner, Ghost Psychiatrist. I owe a hell of a lot to all of these people and their associated creative works.)

We are fighting a war. Our war is against the Game, SBURB. It is the enemy, which destroys our homes, slaughters our families, kills our friends, and breaks our minds. This is a war against a powerful foe, and it will take no small effort to defeat it.

Okay, so that's like, the ultra-hyperbolic pitch here- just so everyone gets the gravitas of the situation. As much as any of you might be wrapped up in your personal quests, remember that the game that gave you your all-important title and aspect, also destroyed your entire planet in a fiery holocaust. _It is not your friend._ If you do not submit to its will, _it will try to kill you._ And it's _very_ good at killing people.

If you have any decency whatsoever, you'll recognize that Sburb's machinations are nowhere near as benevolent as they purport to be. It seeds new universes and new civilizations, only to annihilate them in their prime. For 99% of players reading this, _Sburb killed your parents._ Isn't becoming Batman the next logical step? So how _do_ we become Batman?

Well, let's be blunt here: most of us aren't Bruce Wayne. We're, for the most part, not heirs to some multibillion-dollar corporation with access to the Batcave and a jillion fancy gadgets. Most of us don't have super powers- and don't let the game fool you with those. It does a great job at making you trust your aspect, at convincing you that you're the special chosen hero that will save your Land or whatever. But don't drink the game's Kool-aid, people. It's all fluff, and it'll take those powers away from you in a flash if you put a toe out of line. The resources Sburb gives you comprise a useful toolbox, but they won't save you. Alchemy, too, has limits- confusing, sometimes contradictory limits that never work out the way you expect them to, but still limits. Remember, the game created you, it _owns_ you. I called this a war... but really, it's a prison break.

So what do we have? What we have is our minds. And even then, our minds are under constant assault. The game bombards us with "maturity", "psychological buffs", "communion with your aspect", corruption,  temporal inevitability, normalizing perception filters, and a whole host of mind-altering effects. Defending your brain from the game's Orwellian machinations is of utmost importance if you're to resist it. It wants to make Skaia your God, and your Role your salvation. This is the failure mode- when you let the game decide how your life will be lived, it'll eventually decide it's more dramatic for you to die tragically by it's Knife's Edge.

To plumb the depths of the game's secrets is a highly dangerous endeavor. Considering how risky it is to play the game normally, endeavoring to frustrate its purposes drops the survival rate into frankly unacceptable depths. So, phase 1 of the project, and presumably the lengthiest, is to document the game in its entirety. To look at what happens in the course of Sburb's normal operation, and discover what's safe, what's useful, what's both, and what's neither. To make the game safe to play, so that we can better calculate the risks when we move not to play it, but to take it apart. Thanks to the game's astonishing diversity of content, this is going to take a good long while.

There are several ways to speed it up, however, and every second spent without information is a second people are being killed by this thing. The first thing you can do is to read the [Sburb Glitch FAQ](340777/chapters/551606), by GodsGiftToGrinds. As much as he claims it's not a walkthrough, it's pretty much the best we've got. Think of it as the baseline "common knowledge", but don't be afraid to present new findings. Secondly, you can [submit information](http://spacetimecounselor.tumblr.com/submit) on the game to the Lotus Catalogue, through the submit box on my blog. The submission locker is keyed to the most recent open timestamp, so as to front-load the timeline with findings.

The other mechanism by which the information-gathering process is being sped up is known as the Lotus Project. More about that on the next page, when that goes up.


	2. The Lotus Project

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So what is this Lotus Project?

The Lotus Project was/is/will be my solution to the problem of small sample sizes. The average session doesn't contain enough players to constitute a representative sample of Sburb players, and with the heavy procedural generation and dynamically customized content Sburb features, large sample sizes are necessary to collect data that's accurate enough to be useful. Traditional surveys are unreliable in this context, and more to the point I'd pretty much alienated everyone who could have provided useful figures. In order for my studies to be useful, I needed to coordinate a large number of sessions and ensure that they were able to duplicate experiments within specifications.

A thought hit me, when I was considering the problem. "I can't be there in person to run all these experiments, so I need to rely on-" and then I stopped myself, because my prior was faulty. Sessions, despite some pretty wonky timetrav communication rules, are generally temporally independent. Structures like the Sburb.org servers, the Replay IRC at #ultimatereward, etc can enforce limited continuity, but there wasn't anything to stop me from setting up my own network. The only problem was finding a way to link temporally independent sessions into the structure, without getting entangled in the dongle system that the main replay community seems to run on. (I honestly don't know a lot about how that works, anyway.) Plus they'd give me more hell than they already do if I fouled up their internal workings, so I hit upon a way to contact freelancers.

The Lotus Project consists of some twenty sessions, all of which contain myself at some point on my personal timeline. That is, all of my future sessions up until the terminal end of the chain (maintained by percipientMatriarch, thanks!) are connected to a single database, allowing us to share data in real time as if they were temporally simultaneous. For stability, I'm incapable of direct communication with my future self, but causally secure data can be transmitted freely. The root server is hosted far in the past of the planet my current session was spawned from, and maintained by a generous acquaintance of mine. So far, it's proven to be an excellent host. 

The Lotus Catalogue itself- that is, the database containing experimental data, journals, research notes, and open studies- is open to submission through the [submission box](http://spacetimecounselor.tumblr.com/submit) on my personal blog. Anyone interested in replicating experimental procedures or submitting new data for compilation is welcome to contribute to the project. While the Lotus Network itself is a closed chain, any additional help is greatly appreciated. The Bureau of Investigation here is the face of the database, containing the most interesting or pertinent results from the project. The public timestamp progression is kind of slow, but database write access is available on request and not stamp-linked- so use at your own risk, causally speaking. Nobody wants to have to throw out their data because it turned out to have been generated by a closed loop.

So that turned out to not be hard to explain. Thought this'd be longer. I guess I'll edit this if I get bombarded with questions, but yeah. For now, it looks like the first real article's gonna be on Background ARC and roleplay minmaxing. Expect that whenever?


	3. Background ARC

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Playing your role, and how to protect yourself from the game's deadly rotten tomatoes.

I'm going to open this section assuming you're all familiar with the game's roleplay system. That is, Sburb hands you a Title and Aspect, tells you to make up a character on the spot that fits that role, and then rewards and penalizes you for sticking to it. There's a pronounced series of variables pertaining to how the game determines these bonuses, which all have some particular properties. 

Let's start by defining some terms:

-Roleplay Bonus-

This is the moment-to-moment success or failure of a certain action. While the game will occasionally check your immediate roleplay state when performing ordinary or important noncombat tasks, primarily you'll be running into these checks when fighting or casting aspect abilities.

In-the-moment roleplay bonuses vary depending on your class, if applicable. For example, heavily casting-focused types like Cryptics or Cataclysms will receive casting bonuses when solving problems with abilities, but may also have a different stat boosted if their Aspect's behavioral considerations override the title's. And while a Witch might have her Pluck refilled by a good roleplay choice, that same choice might grant a Waste a boost to Flummoxie, in order to cast a single destructive spell. Similarly, acting against roleplay might drain Pluck for a caster, or screw over the mangrit of a combat class.

The way the game determines whether your current state of mind is good or bad (or whether the action you're attempting fits your role in the first place) is... to be honest, pretty much a crapshoot. There's a good handful of roles for whom this is usually pretty straightforward- Displacement and Exploration classes are especially easy, but otherwise your internal justification isn't going to sway the game's opinion.

-Accumulated Roleplay Coefficient-

Here, however, it's all about your internal justification. Whenever you make some choice- and it can be _any_ choice- the game's going to decide to run a check for the direct roleplay bonus mentioned above (if the choice doesn't fall under the Sanctuary Effect.) If it's a good choice, you'll get a boost to ARC, and a penalty for a bad choice. ARC is your saving grace in a lot of situations- if you need to do something contrary to your role for the sake of the team, you can still pull it off without facing a penalty. It goes both ways, though- if you fuck up your role frequently enough, even a role-appropriate decision will face penalties. 

Now, when it comes to calculating ARC lost and gained, you'd think the first thing that would happen is that it'd check to see if the choice falls under the Sanctuary Effect, and nullify its roleplay impact. What we found was... different. That check comes second, and after that it'll make its actual modifications to a decision and ARC. What happens first?

-Background ARC (or Character Growth)-

Here's where our research comes into play. As it turns out, the game doesn't decide arbitrarily how much coefficient to award to your ARC each time you make a decision. Rather, it's based on one of those tricky hidden stats- one which we found after investigating situations in which a player's roleplay rose or fell without seeming to have made any major decisions.

When the player makes a decision, the roleplay system goes something like this:

  1. Judge choice
  2. Modify background ARC
  3. Determine Sanctuary effect
  4. Judge choice (again, for some reason)
  5. Apply roleplay bonus
  6. Increment or decrement ARC



Background ARC, simply put, is the speed at which you accumulate roleplay coefficient- in other words, your ARC velocity, or character growth. Less simply put, it's a variable multiplier on how much ARC is gained or lost. When you have good CG, good decisions will earn you more ARC, and bad decisions will cost you less ARC. Conversely, a stunted CG will net you less ARC for good decisions, and cost you more for bad ones (with some exceptions involving the Hero Narrative Framework). 

Now, take a look at that process. The Sanctuary effect comes AFTER the modification to CG. What does this mean?

It means that for every single insignificant choice you make, the game will call you on it and fuss around with your score. Sburb is constantly judging you, to see if you can live up to its heroic expectations. Now, it's not all bad- CG's multiplier, compared to the benefits provided by making the right choices when it counts (not under Sanctuary) is really small. Also helpful is the amount of stuff it grades you on- the average player is going to even out to a neutral CG since their role isn't so important every single moment of every day.

However, you do have exceptions, and if you can be one of those exceptions, you can pull off really tremendous stuff. You'll see a player from time to time who seems to be so in-tune with their role that everything they do makes their Aspect ecstatic. When their CG/bARC gets this high, their ARC piles up and ends up doling out huge bonuses to everything they do.

Lucky bastards.

A few final notes on CG:

  * The idea that a positive feedback loop can occur with high ARC and CG rewarding the player even for bad decisions seems to be on everybody's mind, but let's put those rumors to rest: THERE IS NO FEEDBACK LOOP. The path to omnipotence, as it seems, is not paved with LARPing.
  * bARC, unlike ordinary ARC, is aspect-specific and stored as a part of the player. As it turns out, it's a significant part of why replayers have an easy time settling into an aspect they've played before, familiarity aside. 
  * The roleplay system is... not always simple. With Destroyer classes in particular, CG/bARC is extremely variable, and both low and high values can increase the rate of gain in ARC. Whether or not this is intentional and responsible for their ability to both destroy and destroy with their aspect, is as of yet unknown.
  * Players of the Flux/Stage, Might/Sand, or Light/Law dichotomy have CG incrementation glitches that have been known to cause sudden shifts in ARC.
  * Strifing with a combat style thematically in tune with one's role is pretty much the shortcut to having decent background ARC, and a decent band-aid for players having trouble fitting into their title.



And of course, while this article should provide insight on how to better appease one's role, whether or not one _should_ do so is an entirely different question, to be worried about by the paranoid conspiracists among us.

Such as, for example, myself.


	4. contaminatedOrigin Alchemy Q+A

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> contaminatedOrigin sent us some "do this and see what happens" sort of ideas. While that kind of thing doesn't really constitute contributing to research, alchemy's everyone's favorite hobby among the Lotus Project, so it just so happens we can answer some of these questions.

"contaminatedOrigin’s list of things you probably shouldn’t do in SBURB, but might want to consider doing anyway."

Idea: Combine a fetch modus with something vo d rel ted.  
Hypothesis: Creates some kind of ‘trash compactor’ modus, deleting everything stored by it.  
Notes: Could be used to completely break sessions- What denizen, the one I just put in my sylladex?   
══════

While potentially interesting, aspect enchantments tend to disappear when used in alchemy- you might notice a directly aspect-imbued item has the same captcha code as its inert form. However, associated artifacts from a Void player's land do have some interesting properties, and modus alchemization is one of the more exploitable mechanics in Sburb.

First thing you'll need, of course, is the physical modus card. A lot of people spring for the kind that pre-install, but if you want to swap out settings you'll need the modus itself. Most fetch modi, when captchalogued by another modus, don't have a visible code, but the Intellibeam Laserstation is capable of reading these. Alchemizing the Laserstation itself with a modus allows you to skip that step, which is fun. 

Oh, I should give the usual disclaimer: DON'T ALCHEMIZE YOUR FETCH MODUS. It's dangerous and using it is highly likely to glitch out your items! Bad plan! Is what I'm supposed to say, but honestly the horror stories are exaggerated. A better rule, perhaps, is don't captchalogue anything you can't replace. Inventory management is a huge hassle as I'm sure everyone knows, and you don't want to lose some critical artifact to an indexing glitch. The majority of alchemized modi (moduses? modii?) are going to have some really messed up functionality and corrupt (no, not THAT corrupt) your possessions or otherwise lose stuff. If you need to transport something important, stick with official Array-type modi like Wallet and Recipe. Other officially licensed modi are generally perfectly functional, too. That aside, when it comes to just carrying shit around or weaponizing stuff, alchemized modi can actually be pretty useful.

Incidentally, the case you mention with the Denizen, there's no need to worry- the Denizen itself is something like an intelligent debug feature for the game, and even if you've hacked up some nasty Vanishing Modus, it'll be able to identify it and neutralize its effect. The Denizen is indeed one of the most protected entities in the game, with so many scripted invariants to its behavior that it's almost impossible to try to find exploits to beat it. Hell, if it weren't designed to be killable-in-theory by something powerful enough (admin debugging? different subject), dealing with its bullshit would be literally the only option for clearing it.

  
Idea: Use rain’s ability to do absolute bullshit to captchalog grist, attempt to alchemize it.  
Hypothesis: Creates grist at a 1:1 ratio, basically it doesn’t really do anything other than moving grist from your pool into the world.  
Notes: Could be used as a method to transfer grist incredibly quickly. Deposit a bunch of it and have a different player pick it up. Probably would require intellibeam laserstation.  
══════

Rain's gamebreaking potential as an aspect is honestly pretty oversold. While it delights in violating the perceived laws of physics, it's an Aspect like any other, and MOST of the time isn't capable of doing stuff that'd really fuck with underlying game scripts. Except when it is. But even that's never when you can expect or control it- within the Lotus Network, we generally just leave our Rain players the hell alone because they're fucking impossible to involve in controlled experimentation. Basically Rain is like the worst aspect and it doesn't even matter.

On the other hand, alchemized modi are occasionally capable of picking up grist, which is ordinarily just sent to the cache when you try to pick it up. Infamously, "breakable" modi like 8-ball and ship-in-a-bottle will create empty breakables when you try to pick that stuff up, which makes them a key component in alchemodi (I'm calling them that now) that captchalogue ordinarily unobtainable items. 

Unfortunately, while grist does have a code (you need the Laserstation but that goes for practically everything gamebreaky), alchemizing it with stuff generally doesn't do anything interesting, and the cost of alchemizing the stuff is just... itself. Resultant items generally just take on the physical appearance of the given grist type, with the exception of weapons which I'll get to later.  
  
Idea: Prototype something slimelike pre-entry  
Hypothesis: Slime imps/pools of weird gristslime  
Notes: Might fatally wreck a session: monsters could spawn as some kind of blob, and potentially merge. Think hordes of Ohgodwhats, and the Black king as one of them.  
══════

Nope. Slime prototypes are pretty tame- while you do end up with some enemies that merge, it's not the same thing as an Ohgodwhat, and in fact Ohgodwhats that contain slime-prototyped enemies are actually capable of separating out into their consituent mobs. Also your imps will drip weird goo everywhere (well, more of it) and be slightly squishier and have a higher resistance to bladed weaponry, if they're not fully slimelike themselves.

Silly putty, though, is fun times. We actually tested this one deliberately (hard to get the kernel to accept it since it wasn't dead or even similar to something living) and, oh my god, it's hilarious. Just try it, like you hit something with a weapon and it just gets an indentation in its face and ahahahaha it's the best. Fun session, that was. 

  
Idea: See #2. Combine grist with strife specibus of choice.  
Hypothesis: Probably just cosmetic changes. Possibly increasing grist gained?  
Notes: Could be treated by the game as grist(?), and randomly not working as a weapon due to being part game construct.  
══════

Ding ding ding! Alchemizing a weapon with grist will typically increase grist yield of that type for enemies slain with that weapon, at the expense of a little damage. Not by a lot, but if you need to get a lot of grist fast it's a pretty nice trick. The cost of these weapons is pretty steep, usually, so unless you plan to get a lot of mileage out of it, it's not going to pay for itself.  
  
Idea: See #2. Put a captcha card of grist into the jumper extension.  
Hypothesis: Game will not be happy.  
Notes: Possibly treated as having infinite grist of that type? More likely to cause shit to go all kinds of wrong. I’m seeing explosions as pretty likely.  
══════

While Build grist and its gusher-shaped relatives are misinterpreted and just result in a bunch of stupid Betty Crocker marketing all over your alchemiter, other types... well, they technically _have_ an effect, according to the game, but all it does is tell you how much grist of that type is used in a given recipe. Which, you might notice, the standard alchemiter with preview modifications does anyway, so yeah not that useful. Unless you try Uranium grist or any of the really fancy stuff, which has a habit of just breaking your alchemiter. The explosions are a lot smaller than you're imagining.  
  
Idea: Combine a fetch modus with as many aspects as possible.  
Hypothesis: Does jack shit.  
Notes: Rhyme and Flow might have issues (Freezer and Oven modus, anyone?). Mist and Rain in the same modus just sounds like trouble.  
══════

As mentioned, aspect-imbued items behave as inert items alchemically, but items with inherent aspect-aligned enchantments such as those found on your Land can be used for this. Usually it'll just break your modus, but sometimes it'll have an effect. It's one of those things it seems like they started to program because it sounded cool, but then gave up on due to balance issues. Rhyme for example slows down or freezes retrieval, whereas Flow sometimes results in your modus index to move around. The only really useful aspect modi are certain variations on Space (greater pickup range) and Might (greater item size). But they'll still probably break your modus anyway. If you've got access, go ahead and rummage around in the Lotus public logs in the database itself, people have all kinds of inane recipes in there.


	5. Doomedself Ethics and Beta Invariants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As it turns out, timeline-enforced intentional repeated mass suicide isn't great.

So. Time travel's a pretty nasty business, but one thing you can count on is that everything's going to be part of a stable time loop. It makes it easy to deal with prophecies and such, since you can rely on the law of noncontradiction.

Except when you can't. See, one would imagine that in a loop-stability timetrav paradigm, any possible worlds wherein loops were not successfully closed would be impossible, and as such not exist. That just makes sense, right? Only, no. In Sburb, a timeline where a stable loop doesn't close persists. Only, it persists with an abstract "doomed" tag, such that everything in it is slated to be destroyed by various means. It doesn't just collapse under the weight of impossibility- the timeline itself just recognizes "this is wrong" and undertakes very specific and very anthrocentric steps toward depopulation.

This isn't the kind of behavior you'd expect from a consistent universe that operates using physical laws. This is the kind of behavior you'd expect from human programmers, trying to build a garbage collection algorithm for unused reality data. "Beta timelines", as they're termed, continue to exist under new, decidedly grimmer circumstances, which play themselves out in a way curiously similar to Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians". The universe becomes an implacable serial killer, for no particularly obvious reason.

All of this would be safely hidden away, of course, if nobody could escape. But as it happens, people can, and do. Time players, usually, utilizing their sanctioned in-game powers to rewind and return to the self-consistent alpha. An alpha that somehow now includes an addtional person, now, who appeared out of thin air. A _literally impossible_ person, whose experiences aren't connected to causal reality.

This is the doomed player, and they're going to die.

Well, kind of. The game tags them with something like an XML tag, which identifies them as "doomed". Players of Doom and Law are capable of seeing this around them, some kind of very specific mechanic that ensures that they're going to die somehow. In fact, for most purposes, the game treats them as already being dead, and as such there are some fun workarounds. Doomed players can be prototyped into your sprite easily, and the "revival" script on sprites overrides their doomed status (although sprites tend toward removing themselves anyway, but that's another article). Doomedselves can also god-tier if they bring their _own_ dreamself (an instance where the game's identity tracking actually WORKS- they can't use the alpha dreamself), but that doesn't clear it completely- doomed godtiers will always receive a Just death.

That aside, in the absence of an unprototyped sprite, a Thief/Rogue of Doom (if you have one of these guys, _become their best friend_ ), or a god tier event, the game's going to kill them. It's not a matter of "can you save them" so much as "how long can you save them", and if they persist too long the gave just gives up and slaps them with a heart attack. It's usually more creative than that, though.

So that's more or less how they work (Rule #1 of Sburb: There are always exceptions), but there's some very particular issues involving how to treat doomed players.

Within the Lotus Project, doomed selves are really useful for high-risk testing. So much of Sburb is trying to kill you that having a fall guy is invaluable, and said fall guys can provide you with useful information in the meantime. Need to do some test that can't occur in the alpha timeline? Go ahead and do it, then send the Time player back with your results. Odds are, when you decide to do that, your time player will appear out of nowhere and hand you the research report, saving you the trouble.

Confession time: until certain facts came to light, we made EXTENSIVE use of Beta testing to increase productive density. It was like playing hundreds of instances of the same session at once- until we realized how the doom system functions and what was really happening.

This brings us to Beta invariants- that is, finding a way to deliberately move into a beta timeline. It goes something like this:

  1. Select a session postcondition- something that will necessarily be true at the end of your session. Something like the Genesis Frog's existence, the life of your Space player, or an irreplaceable landmark staying intact.
  2. Send conclusive evidence of this postcondition back to the beginning of the session, once you reach the end (harder than you'd think to find something solid).
  3. Violate the postcondition by creating a situation irreconcilable with the postcondition proof.
  4. (optional) Confirm violation by asking your Doom or Law player if everyone's been marked for death.
  5. Congratulations! You're now in a beta timeline, and you can do whatever you want!



Using this, you can create a new blank-slate doomed timeline in which to conduct research or pursue other goals with no consequences, aside from everybody's impending doom, and no real time wasted. Only, that turned out to be kind of an ethical nightmare, afterlife aside.

See, we started using this method to create hundreds of doomed timelines, under the impression that since we would know that we were doomed in these invariant-violate timelines, we'd be able to return and help ourselves out instead of getting immediately killed. This worked like a charm, and instances of our time players began to flood in with detailed research reports. To be honest, it was orders of magnitude more useful than the Lotus Project itself, which primarily existed to provide a good sample size- many iterations of one session could still be subject to special conditions and exceptions that would mess with the data. But then we did a population study on our own doomed selves, and discovered something terrible about beta timelines and the game itself.

Vector-of-will theory (initially proposed by bladekindEyewear) has gained a lot of ground among time theorists (despite some interesting exceptions like the metal-twelve illustration[1]), and the very success of the invariant method itself confirmed that at the very least, vectors of will were responsible for the creation of splinter timelines. Contrary to classical time theory, reality doesn't contain an infinite number of possible realities based on choices, but rather a finite number of possible realities based on the decisions of _players empowered to affect timelines_. And as any Mind player can tell you, you don't have infinite choices, and the choices you _do_ have contain real power to shape the timeline. What people _want_ is a component of how the game generates stable loops- and unstable ones.

This is all according to vector-of-will theory, which still has holes and inconsistencies with certain game cases (and little in the way of numbers regarding game will balanced against player will)- but it was enough of a concern for us to discontinue Beta testing- the risk that we were creating new realities where everyone was doomed was too high to continue playing that game.

Interesting, though, that everyone's fine with playing an entirely _different_ game that creates universes wherein everybody (save for some special exceptions created by time travel exploits) is destined to die. You know what I'm talking about.

*[1] The metal-twelve illustration comes from [this discussion](http://sburbunofficial.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=logs&action=display&thread=455). Where do materials involved in closed time loops come from?


	6. Saccharine Doppelgangers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh my god oh my god oh my god kill it

 

 

 

> **19:25 spacetimeCounselor 14 tried investigating these guys but we really didn't get anything useful**  
>  19:25 stanzicApparati ...wHat dO yOu mEan bY 'tRied iNvestigating'?  
>  **19:27 spacetimeCounselor well we didn't have a plan in particular but the smith apparently had a LOT of doomed timelines where he did really inadvisable stuff with alchemy**  
>  **19:27 spacetimeCounselor we got some freaky reports back from them**  
>  19:27 mislaidLullaby  <| Just...Stop |>  
>  19:27 mislaidLullaby <| Please |>  
>  19:27 stanzicApparati BEn?  
>  19:27 tenaciousTheseus And don't talk about them  
>  19:28 ventricularPipefitter Whatcha get, Benedict?  
>  **19:28 spacetimeCounselor the scary thing is that they're not really game-handled- their shinies if they have any are next to impossible to get at, meta-targeting abilities don't work, player IDs don't have anything on them, etc**  
>  19:28 mislaidLullaby  <| Please take it to PMs |>  
>  **19:28 spacetimeCounselor like they don't seem to be part of the game at all**  
>  **19:28 spacetimeCounselor there's no exception handling even**  
>  **19:29 spacetimeCounselor they pass the turing test, though, which is scary enough**  
>  19:29 tenaciousTheseus Spacou  
>  19:29 tenaciousTheseus Please  
>  19:29 tenaciousTheseus Stop  
>  19:29 ventricularPipefitter PM is fine with me.
> 
> 19:31 ventricularPipefitter Side-memo it is. Repeat that for everyone else's benefit?  
>  **19:31 spacetimeCounselor "so far as we can tell they're... "people" just insanely powerful psychopaths with some weird foreign amoral crazytalk"**  
>  **19:31 spacetimeCounselor jubilant there was pretty characteristic of their usual mindset- they think people are gross and want to kill them?**  
>  19:31 tenaciousTheseus Sounds about right  
>  19:32 ventricularPipefitter Is 'passes the turing test' your standard for 'people?'  
>  **19:32 spacetimeCounselor although there was the one who**  
>  **19:32 spacetimeCounselor well he didn't talk, but he was made of i dunno ice cream or something and constantly cried while slashing people apart**  
>  **19:32 spacetimeCounselor and well not quite but i mean they're clearly self-consistent living beings instead of like, mindless robots**  
>  **19:33 spacetimeCounselor just really fucked up inhuman living beings**  
>  **19:33 spacetimeCounselor most avenues of research plain didn't work- they're practically invisible to the game**  
>  **19:33 spacetimeCounselor unless they get your pendant, in which case they're still glitchy as hell but they can**  
>  **19:33 spacetimeCounselor "replace" people kinda**  
>  19:33 ventricularPipefitter Even Angels and Horrorterrors are better understood.  
>  19:33 tenaciousTheseus They're theorized to be something the game was planning on doing  
>  19:34 tenaciousTheseus But was dummied out  
>  **19:34 spacetimeCounselor if SDs were at any point a planned feature, it was probably a one-man job that got shelved as soon as someone took a look at it**  
>  **19:34 spacetimeCounselor everything that relates to game code with them is like an interface instead of a concrete class**  
>  **19:35 spacetimeCounselor which isn't much**  
>  **19:35 spacetimeCounselor they're... upsettingly real**  
>  19:35 ventricularPipefitter Say that again without jargon for the less-computer literate.  
>  **19:36 spacetimeCounselor like the game has loads of systems for dealing with physical matter such as what people are made of, and treating them like game entities**  
>  **19:36 spacetimeCounselor but there's practically nothing for SDs**  
>  **19:36 spacetimeCounselor they OBEY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS which is freaky as hell**  
>  19:36 ventricularPipefitter But useful.  
>  19:36 tenaciousTheseus Have you tried analyzing a trickster bed?  
>  19:36 ventricularPipefitter They'd have to find one.  
>  19:36 tenaciousTheseus Or have you even found a trickster bed?  
>  **19:36 spacetimeCounselor that session didn't have trickster beds as far as we could tell yeah**  
>  **19:37 spacetimeCounselor what'd really be useful is to observe them at the moment of creation, but all our data comes from unplanned doomed timelines where the smith fucked up**  
>  19:37 tenaciousTheseus Please don't make any SDs  
>  19:38 spacetimeCounselor it's unintuitive that something so unfettered by the game could be a product of alchemy  
>  19:38 ventricularPipefitter Well. We knew someone that was trying to make them.  
>  19:38 ventricularPipefitter She's dead.  
>  **19:40 spacetimeCounselor my working theory is that they were... some kind of parallel project to sburb, built on the same reality-handling hardware but unconnected to the game itself**  
>  **19:42 spacetimeCounselor anyway SDs are on a whole different level than corruption dangerwise, we haven't tried to use designed splinter timelines to test them because there's the chance that an SD could get the time artifacts and break into the alpha**  
>  **19:42 spacetimeCounselor this fear is mostly based on the fact that it happened**  
>  **19:42 spacetimeCounselor and someone died**  
>  19:42 tenaciousTheseus Oh god  
>  19:42 stanzicApparati wHat  
>  19:43 stanzicApparati pLease, /pLease/ tEll mE yOu kIlled tHe tHing  
>  **19:43 spacetimeCounselor yeah we messed it up good**  
>  **19:43 spacetimeCounselor but it killed calcifiedIntent**  
>  **19:43 spacetimeCounselor poor kid**  
>  **19:47 spacetimeCounselor anyway it's not really a priority to research these guys more atm, since they're bloody dangerous to even have around and they don't seem to be connected to anything important**  
>  **19:47 spacetimeCounselor except for the hardware thing but we're going to have to find an easy way to kill them before we try making any deliberately**  
>  19:47 stanzicApparati fUck  
>  19:47 stanzicApparati iF tHe gAme dOesn't eVen aCknowledge tHem mOst oF tHe tIme  
>  19:48 stanzicApparati iT wOuldn't tAg tHem aS dOomed wOuld iT?  
>  **19:48 spacetimeCounselor that's an interesting question**  
>  **19:48 spacetimeCounselor is doom handling a universal variable or a game mechanic**  
>  19:48 tenaciousTheseus ...  
>  **19:48 spacetimeCounselor we couldn't test with the one that made it back because, you know, we had to focus on killing it**  
>  19:49 stanzicApparati BEn, /pLease/  
>  19:49 stanzicApparati dOn't tEst wIth SDs  
>  19:49 spacetimeCounselor not right now obviously  
>  19:49 stanzicApparati NOt /eVer/, /pLease/  
>  **19:49 spacetimeCounselor but once i find some kind of shortcut to omnipotence or whatnot and can kill them without breaking a sweat**  
>  **19:49 spacetimeCounselor it shouldnt be a problem**  
>  **19:50 spacetimeCounselor incidentally that was only kind of a joke**  
>  **19:50 spacetimeCounselor the sentiment is "if we figure out how to deal with them safely, then yeah we'll test"**  
>  **19:51 spacetimeCounselor they're crazy powerful so that's unlikely to happen but**  
>  **19:51 spacetimeCounselor not gonna lay down ultimatums on what knowledge i will and won't stay away from**  
>  **19:51 spacetimeCounselor because come on**  
>  19:52 tenaciousTheseus Yeah, sharing it will give you the moral high ground from which you can laugh at us

So, Saccharine Doppelgangers. Perhaps you've heard of them- candy-coated clones of players who show up when alchemy goes wrong, super psychotic and murderous. One of them recently (for certain values of recently) killed someone who was trying to escape them on the IRC, and it sparked a discussion. I don't like posting this kind of thing instead of a more in-depth post, but with SDs, this was really all there was to say on the matter.

Some background: Lotus 14, I was Dame of Might (more BS title assignment), and we had a Smith of Heart by the name of Jacob, who was the inciting factor in a whole mess of doomed timelines. (Also we had this guy with a glitched "of Other" title but that's probably not connected.) Not intentional splinter timelines like the last chapter, just the usual sort. After doomed me after doomed me came through with reports warning us not to let him do alchemy unsupervised, we put a close eye on the guy.

Not without casualties, though- calcifiedIntent, Nicholas Rodriguez, Page of Rhyme, had his dreamself assassinated by the kind agents of Derse, and as such didn't have an extra life left when a Saccharine Doppelganger from a doomed timeline got his hands on our Time player's clocks and started cutting people apart. Almost everyone lost a life on that one (Chris had to do a lot of corpsesmooching), but we managed to subdue the thing. By which I mean tear it limb from limb for killing the nicest little kid I ever met.

So. Watch out for those things. They're not a part of the game, they're not your Nightmare Heir, they're just psychotic unstoppable monsters who need to be ruthlessly put down.

Good ways to kill them:  
+Drop a bridge on 'em! They crush real good. They're really fast and unlikely to be caught unawares, but a Space player will find it worth their while to burn Pluck casting teleport on a boulder or somesuch above their heads. If they see it coming, though, and it's not something ludicrously huge like a battleship or whatever, all you've done is give them a rock to throw.  
+Fight underwater. Despite their sugary complexion, they don't dissolve in water (and don't need to breathe), but they don't move around too well either. Then again, neither do you unless you're a player of Might using [Lies with the Sea], or one of them alien mermaids. Either way, it slows down their reaction time and they'll be vulnerable to ranged attacks.  
+Kill 'em with fire! They burn as good as anything else (better, even), and don't have any fancy game mechanics like a health bar to protect them. Problem is, they know how to stop, drop and roll, so you'll want to either restrict their movement or make sure the fireball in question is of considerable magnitude and duration.

Bad ways to kill them:  
-Stabbing. They don't have hearts, really, or any vital organs to speak of. Cutting off limbs can incapacitate them, at least. That candy skin is tough as hell, though, so you're more likely to do nothing at all. Plus, melee combat is really insanely risky in general. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't. Bl- wait that's the wrong monster. But yeah, they're fast and will kick your ass in a straight fight.  
-Super powerful weapons. Remember when I said they follow the laws of physics? Well, unfortunately, that means that your super +10 Greataxe of Devouring you alchemized isn't going to have any of its active stat bonuses when fighting these guys. If it makes you faster or something, it'll still work, but the damage modifiers on legendary equipment just don't apply to these guys, since they're mostly independent of the game code.  
-The power of friendship. While this kind of bullshit might get a pass in Sburb most of the time, these guys are not secretly your friend deep down. They might look like your coplayer, but that is because they murdered them and stole their face, not necessarily in that order. They do not listen to reason. They do not respond to appeals to emotion. They think you're worthless and that you should die and this is an invariant feature of their mental landscape.

And that's about it. They're not special or interesting, they're just freaky monsters who want everybody dead. Make them dead first, so they can't do that.

ADDENDUM from the future: Holy balls, for the love of god don't let your Rain players anywhere near these guys. You would not believe; you would not _fucking_ believe.


	7. Lateral Version Drift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How and why does the game change over "time"?

Every session is different. No two are just the same! I'm paraphrasing Leomard Sportsinterviews here, but seriously. Aside from the powerful procedural generation tools used to generate individual worlds, quests, and players, individual instances of the game display a number of small (or sometimes not-so-small) mechanical variations underneath the usual customization. The game seems to change over time, from our perspective as replayers. The infamous Clown class, as some remember, used to be called "Faun", and served as a perfectly functional active counterpart to the Maid class. But not anymore, it seems.

The prevalent theory for some time has been that the Replay community as a whole is "drifting" through variants of sessions, passively being moved from one version of the game to another. The proposed mechanism for this drift makes sense on the surface- when a modified version of the game succeeds and creates a universe, all instances of the game in that universe are the same as the game that spawned it. This would produce exponentially more instances of that modified game type, until it rose to prevalence in the overall session population.

Of course, if you're familiar with biology at all, you'll notice something suspicious. Modified game types appear to become "dominant", such that older mechanics like the Faun class get replaced entirely by Clown. Clearly, something happened to make Clown!Sburb more common than Faun!Sburb, even though presumably sessions feauturing Fauns would successfully spawn universes more often than those with Clowns. Which game features appear and disappear seem to be completely random- there are _no consistent selection pressures!_ A purely reproductive model of Sburb fails to provide reasons for the "genome" of sessions as they exist today.

The first insight into resolving the mystery was the proposal that "utility in spawning a new universe" was not the selection pressure on game traits. That is, reproductive success didn't determine what "genes" spread. So what did?  
As it happens, the answer was lateral gene transfer. The gist of the concept is "replayers bring their games with them, invisibly updating the game with the code they carry".

~~~

Let's have some background, first. I should start with a caveat on modding the game- while it's possible to make small changes to Sburb by modifying the game code provided in a session's Frog Temple during compilation, it's fairly dangerous and the variables that aren't cosmetic are likely to glitch your game something fierce. As far as we've been able to tell, the encoded ~ATH on the temple walls is something of a front, controlling a handful of basic parameters but not containing the full implementation of the Sburb engine.

One basic parameter, however, was enough to test whether lateral code transfer via replayer was actually happening. The player command [Homestuck Anthem] displays to the player a brief overview of the game's "plot". The text of this overview, however, can be changed by the person compiling the game, as one of my first-session coplayers did in order to send a message through time. While it's likely that this message has propogated to the universe our session created, there was no particular reason for it to appear anywhere else.

What I found in my second session, however- a replay game with no connection to the universe spawned by the first- was that the code for [Homestuck Anthem] in the Frog Temple _still contained my coplayer's message_. An associate of mine changed the message back, for the convenience of later players- but this was nearly solid proof. The only remaining step was to confirm that the session wasn't spawned by my previous session, which the Lotus Project has confirmed. By making small edits to things like the text color or spelling of the [Homestuck Anthem] message, we confirmed that game code from one replayer's session appeared in the frog temple of the next.

~~~

So what does this mean, and how does it happen? Firstly, it explains why replayers rarely if ever encounter "older" versions of the game. As a general rule (but not without exception), "new" game code will supercede "old" game code, meaning that "old" code (however age is determined in the timeless reference frame of paradox space) is constantly being overwritten. Age, or rather, precedence of code is tricky to figure out, and follows rules as convoluted as they are inscrutable.

But the question remains: How does "Lateral Version Drift" actually occur? How is it that players can "carry" updates with them?

It's time for the part of the show I like to call "Sburb Messes Up Your Head Without Asking, Really It's Creepy As Fuck", or Smuyhwa Ricaf. This part tends to make me so angry that my face turns red an blue at the same time- evens out to something like fuchsia. It's My Fuchsia War with the game, here.

See, you know your Shiny? That glowy ball of not-quite-soul that Heart players can pull out and manipulate? The thing that's supposed to represent your very being? Well, it turns out the game just hides stuff in there like you're its personal trashcan, because where else would it store critical data?  
Your shiny, in addition to kind of being... "you", as perceived by the game, contains a whole mess of game maintenance code. Stuff that keeps the game from falling apart at the seams, drawing on your subconscious to keep things running. Some of you might be familiar with part of the debug code it hides- specifically, the genetic code of the Debug NPC, which people tend to invisibly scrawl all over their walls for some reason.

Anyway, we've had our Heart players take a look, and there's a tangle of different engine code types all packaged inside something labeled [Soul Pollen]. There are the margins where Sburb scrawls its notes, and then when a whole bunch of players get together they all copy each other's notes and the game gets confused and tries to work out which notes are correct. Coordinating with multiple sessions, we've found that while usually (except occasionally with Void players or with some nasty glitches) everyone in a session has identical [Soul Pollen], Pollen is slightly different between sessions. Once the game works out which traits are "dominant" or take precedence in expression, it implements new changes and modifies everyone's Pollen accordingly.  
As a side note: this information in your Shiny is read-only, and even then it's obfuscated to hell and back. There's a lot of core stuff in there that even god-tier Heart players can't touch- to be honest, the way the Shiny stores personal information in concert with your physical brain is kind of weird and muddy and you'd be better off asking a native Heart veteran like ventricularPipefitter about how it all works.

So what does all this mean? It means that as replayers travel through sessions, they pick up slight variations in code from their coplayers, and over time reach a state that's closer and closer to equilibrium, until new "dominant" modifications arise and start moving amongst replayers. "Clown" had precedence over "Faun", and so as players carried around the Clown code, sessions where Faun appeared became less and less frequent, until now the game's all fucked up and it's our fault for spreading the genes.

The implications of this system, its ramifications for the purpose of the replay system, and speculation on its effect on the development of Sburb as a whole... is all theoretical, and as such is an article for another time.


	8. Atarlost's troublesome report

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some guy sent us some stuff about the game, which we put to the test.

So I've just received some interesting observations from a session that's been up to some funny stuff. Apparently they played from a militarized high-technology world? A lot of this is pretty vague, and further attempts to contact them for clarification have been futile, but I'll do my best to address this stuff I guess.

 

> _This will probably be the only communication you receive from us.  We have no interest in replaying the game on its own terms and are heading into the black.  We intend to find another session and hijack the skaia defense portals.  A post-apocalyptic wasteland sounds a fair sight better than this game._
> 
> _Before we go we have some possibilities to suggest._
> 
> _1) we think we have confirmation that the game is what dooms worlds.  Documentation indicates that carapacian exiles will rebuild civilization on the same worlds, but our world was not devastated.  Sufficiently advanced space defenses can handle abbreviated reckonings from multiple sessions.   Also, something was fishy with ectobiology in our session and all the other sessions spawned on our world.  Ancestors were created but not players._
> 
> _Conjecture:  First guardians are related to doom.  As far as we know there wasn’t one. and we accordingly didn’t create one.  They may not be a necessary loop and if you aren’t certain you have one it may be best to ensure you don’t._

Okay, so... they had a missile defense system which shot down the Reckoning's meteors, which evidently came from multiple session instances that spawned from the same root universe. Generally, while Sburb is distributed en masse to a world, the game reparametrizes the source planet for each session, causing... not entirely parallel worlds, but abstracted "instances" of the world that vary primarily in that recursive game entities (meteors, first guardians, the frog temple) exist only in relation to that instance. Only, here, the world wasn't split into entry instances? And ectobiology was weird? I don't even know. Nothing really to test here, just a glitch report and for some reason a warning about First Guardians, despite their not having encountered any.

> _2)  Sylladexes are bad.  Real technology follows real physics and game abstractions’ ability to ignore physics is a cheat.  Sylladex corruption appears to be a deliberate mechanic to prevent “unbalanced” technology from being used.  High powered weaponry that has been gamified by contact with a sylladex or alchemiter will do “fair” damage to game abstractions.  It’s perfectly good against saccharine dopplegangers, but nowhere near as good as it should be against game constructs and players.  You can bypass this by alchemizing components that are not in and of themselves weapons and conducting final assembly by hand, waldo, or robot._

Yeah, it's become increasingly evident that ubiquitous pre-game abstractions like sylladices, strife specibi, the echeladder et cetera are game-spawned and create a strong perception filter- part of the forced suspension of disbelief the game generally drops on people to smooth their entry. That's one of the _really_ scary things about this game.

He hits on something here, regarding the function of the Strife Specibus- it's a way for the game to interpret weaponry- that is, real devices built by people to take advantage of physical properties of matter to harm opponents- and translate them to effectiveness against game opponents. There's a guest section in the Sburb Glitch FAQ following mine that addresses those mechanics- really, it's a game balance system, and like he says it's used to make weaponry fair against foes. Which is really a good thing, because for most people, standard weaponry just wouldn't cut it against giant endgame enemies. I don't know what ridiculous space guns he's used to toting around that'd make the specibus mechanic a bad thing, but there you go.

Incidentally, yeah, we've confirmed that manually assembling weaponry from nonweapon parts skips the abstraction process- but you'd need to build something really frickin esoteric to prevent it from autoassigning to your specibus as a gun or whatever.

> _3) Hope is the best aspect.  Hope is about rejection and, at least for some classes, rejecting the game actually boosts your ARC.  From the roleplay angle hope is also about actual hope, even though none of the powers actually relate thereto.   Stealing hope is absurdly easy because in a war situation like sburb hope is a zero sum game.  In this particular case there is a positive ARC/GC feedback loop as long as you have enemies to crush the dreams of.  It reached the point where anything planned by the thief of hope that could be interpreted as a heist could not seem to fail (no guarantees against losses though).  Destroying hope is metaphorically the same thing so the prince should be able to get in on this too._
> 
> _It’s possible that this can also relate to displacement classes and light, but our rogue of light thinks it’s the thief of hope that broke the game.  She’s pretty broken herself though._

While I'm completely on board with the "Hope is the best aspect" thing, the takeaway here is that Hope's whole rejection shtick lets you game the roleplay system to a ridiculous degree. [Hope Rides Alone] can pull some sicknasty stuff, but... it should be noted that the "positive feedback loop" is more just a manual climb- Hope's roleplay flexibility means that it's very hard to do things that negatively impact your ARC or CG, and those that do are dampened significantly. It's hard to tank your ARC while playing Hope, especially when you have so many abilities that kick in on the brink of disaster.

> _4) The game can’t handle technology very well._

Okay so, wow, whoever this stuff came from was clearly from a pretty incredible world, given that there was all this stuff about cyborgs and orbital housing and spaceflight and stuff. Also, he implies he nuked the carapace kingdoms? Uh. But, yeah, Sburb evidently wasn't designed for high-technology worlds, which I'd hazard a guess is why it targets Earths before a certain threshold of advancement, as well as the Alternian breeding planet. It's possible this is deliberate on the game's part- it wants to snuff out civilizations before they can become more powerful than itself.

We'll see.


	9. Lateral Drift and Sburb's Dark Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the big one, folks. You should probably really get your mind ready to process the ramifications of this.

THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY | THEORY

The following, continuing on from my post on lateral version drift, is largely speculation, and should be treated as such. That is, as _scarily plausible_ , seriously worrying speculation that should be addressed with the requisite gravitas.

From the last chapter: "As replayers travel through sessions, they pick up slight variations in code from their coplayers, and over time reach a state that's closer and closer to equilibrium, until new "dominant" modifications arise and start moving amongst replayers."

The game, as we've seen, has specific, complicated code in place to ensure that this session data is carried between players. Update handling, by necessity, is something fundamental to Sburb's code- it couldn't have been a modification that spread by itself. Somehow, Sburb wanted a system in place to synchronize players from different sessions, in the event that they would end up in the same session. But... when would that happen? Under normal circumstances, players presumably play once, and then leave. "Null and Void" scratch/postscratch sessions happen occasionally, but in these circumstances, both sessions are necessarily spawned from the same instance of the game!

Which leaves the Replay system. How can the game update itself, across hundreds and thousands and billions and more of individual universes? If they're to release a patch, how can they deliver it to self-contained sessions? What I propose is this: that the replay system was originally conceived as a way to distribute game updates to failed sessions. Updates didn't need to be universal- they only needed to be targeted at sessions whose flaws prevented them from successfully bearing fruit. So, they allowed players to opt in to a new game, where they would update the session and carry it to a successful conclusion.

But there were complications, weren't there? For one, their replay button was broken- it disabled the continue button, forcing replayers into the cycle we're all familiar with. Replayers couldn't remove themselves from the game, and they'd carry their updates into each new session- including the replay bug itself. We've seen it before- players replay, if rarely, into sessions with first-time players. And then they win, and those first-time players themselves end up in the replay loop. It happened, of course, to me- a veteran speedrunner was deployed to fix our broken 5-person session, and now bayesianMechanist and I are here to stay.  
As you continue to replay, you complete session after session, creating new, healthy frogs... whose game sessions carry the broken replay system. And what you'd expect to see, if this was the case, new replayer after new replayer finding their way to Sburb.org, wondering why they were trapped in this game.  
And huh. Funnily enough, we do see that.

So many players get used to the grind. Playing over and over and over for years, trying to survive, refusing to take their chance on a meteor or some potentially doomed world. Not abandoning the friends and allies they've made, trying to survive the game. So they play, and as they play they create new worlds, and as they create new worlds... their progeny appear to share their fate. Because the more you play, the more the wheels of Sburb continue to turn, the longer Skaia hangs so benevolently in space... well, you can see for yourself.

~~~

So that's food for thought, isn't it? Chew on that for a bit. I've got a little more speculation on the issue- something a little more fun, maybe, with some interesting ramifications. Maybe explain why Sburb is such a huge clusterfuck of unfinished and broken mechanics.

The first question is "where do updates come from?" It's clear that changes are happening at some point- on a level deeper than that which can be modified during compilation of the Temple's frogcode. Presumably, there were some original programmers- and how disorganized, fractious, crazy, or just plain evil they were isn't really important at the moment, because we're assuming their original product was a singular thing.

But at some point, an "original" Sburb was released, and then later modified, with things like Faun to Clown and other such alterations. How? By who? The original designers, acting on their own? By what method? For what purpose? How do people get access to the engine to make these changes? So far, uh, we don't know. There's some stuff you can modify at compile-time (like the [Homestuck Anthem] we've been using to test inheritance), but creating new game content or otherwise interfacing with the reality engine that drives the game is... something we haven't scratched the surface of.  
Regardless of how and who modified the game, it's clear that many, many changes have been made to the game over the course of its existence. But how far back does it go? We know that "modders" are capable of replacing or creating classes (Clown), adding new sets of aspects (Coins, Stage, Flesh etc.), modifying land generation... so how much of Sburb's content is "vanilla", and how much was built on top?

It's an interesting question- did the game always feature the Scratch? Or the Nightmare Heir? How about the Underworld, and its host of Angels that seem to have no connection to the rest of the game? Why does the game's [Corruption] stat (btw, there's a corruption stat, more about that later) function apart from the mechanism that maims the Shiny? And speaking of Shinies, why do the capabilities of Heart players vary so wildly? Where did the Skaian Magicant come from, and who was responsible for the clipping errors that it attaches to? Why are the consorts so much less intelligent than the practically human carapacians? How come the Crypt Slabs have so many esoteric activation conditions? Why are there so many removed or glitched stats that don't get tracked? Who the hell's responsible for the vast array of unfinished or broken machinery and construction out in the Veil?

We've made some preliminary progress on tagging game features and grouping them according to certain code patterns, in order to start investigating this stuff. If you want to take a look, ask me or percipientMatriarch for a key to the Lotus database. Still, there's a long way to go before we can reconstruct anything like a history of Sburb's development. However, if we can go back far enough, perhaps we might uncover the secrets of the game's origins- and maybe, if we're lucky, a way to bring all this to an end.


	10. The Shifting Magicant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whose dumb idea was this glitch? Because it was someone's idea.

Man, I'd gotten used to having the game supply my computing devices with infinite electricity and didn't think I'd lose this entire post to an ass-random crash out of nowhere. The post was intended to help people cope with a new variation to the game that's popped up- you might remember the article on lateral drift (which got like no comments compared to the other ones? Come on, people, this is heavy shit, have some opinions about it!). Anyway, this has to do with the Skaian Magicant- the weird, out-of-place 1920s safe zone hidden behind fake walls throughout your session.

The definitive post on the Skaian Magicant in GGTG's Glitch FAQ was written before this mod started going around amongst replayers, so you won't find mention of its shifting behavior there. Frankly, it was a lot better before somebody decided it'd be a great idea to have the Magicant do some spooky-ass Hogwarts act and shuffle itself around periodically. Real dynamite idea, dude! For your contribution, we've made you this custom tailored suit, made of tar and feathers, and you've won a brand new car which is actually a splintery rail!

The shifting Magicant behavior, although it spreads like any other mod (who ARE these modder guys?), doesn't actually manifest except under a host of specific conditions. Lemme throw some numbers at you from the Lotus:  
First incidence: Session 5/20  
10/16 sessions have shifting Magicant  
9/10 shifting sessions featured a player of Law or Light  
8/10 shifting sessions featured a Mage or Witch  
1/10 shifting sessions had plot-important subconscious wall drawings (way below normal incidence)

Here's a few fun facts about how this works.

>The Magicant doesn't generate new rooms, nor does it make any disappear. What it can do, however, is split its rooms into disconnected parts that can't be accessed by the rest of it. There's a set number of rooms in the Magicant, which are generated either before or at the start of the game. The randomization simply changes which doors lead to which other doors. Usually, though, at least one of the doors in a section will lead to someone's Land or another external location, so if you keep track of its exits you shouldn't just lose rooms altogether.

>Each room in the Magicant has a number of doors, all of which can potentially connect to another room. This includes doors on the floor and ceiling (although these usually lead out into the "real" world). Doors that don't connect to anything disappear, and become blank walls. You might want to mark those so that posters and whatnot don't disappear when the door reappears later- and look out for conspicuous blank walls in new rooms, since you can kinda sorta tell what surfaces are likely to be doors.

>The Magicant has little regard for logical geometric orientation- if it wants to fit a room into its network, it'll have few qualms about just flipping rooms wholesale. This'll mirror everything in the room, including text- so you might want to avoid storing important documents in there. What's really weird is when the game does this with you INSIDE it- when your brain gets mirrored, you won't notice anything at first... but then you leave the room and find that everything ELSE appears to be flipped turnways. cartesianRelativity has a little article on the subject I'll quote here:

-The Lemonsnout Turnabout-  
[...]  
so what to do if your sprite's been flipped? now, no worries- while you're likely to experience some initial disorientation, your nervous system got flipped just fine! you don't have to worry about walking left when you meant to go right. having to read everything backwards, though, can be quite an inconvenience! to flip your sprite back, and cure lemonsnout turnabout, you have a number of options!  
-firstly, you can ask the carapace folk for help! these fellows, although you might not see it, are capable of flipping their sprites at will! there's a certain sidequest- you'll want to ask sir rumble viii on prospit, or the scurrilous merchant on derse, and after a charming little fetch quest, all carapaces will demonstrate this technique if you ask.   
-please note that learning to carapace flip can have strange side-effects regarding in-game graphics! ideograils on your hands or otherwise are processed separately from the rest of your body, and are improperly mirrored in a number of situations. other sfx decals throughout the game may stick in place during the mirroring process.  
-you have the option of staying in the skaian magicant until it flips itself once more! this however is unreliable and in rare cases has resulted in players seeing everything upside down! attempting to dream while flipped in the magicant can result in severe disorientation and identification bugs with your dreamself! as such, this is not recommended!  
-the ability to flip at will is a mid-level ability for Space players, known as [The Lemonsnout Turnabout]! this is what gives the condition its name, and if you are a hero of Space you can reverse the condition by yourself. and if you are skilled like myself, you are capable of doing the same to other players via freestyling!  
[...]

So yeah blah blah blah that kid is really excitable but whatever he (she? hard to tell) does a good job, anyway. Back to the Magicant:

>The process of changing doors... well, it's not quite as simple as you'd expect from a game abstraction. The game actually... twists up space to connect them- like imagine each room is a box with a bunch of wires representing its doors, that connect to other rooms' wires. And the game's always pulling wires apart and connecting them to new wires, without doing anything to keep them straight. So, it's kind of like when you've got a whole bunch of wires under your TV, and it just sort of naturally gets snarled into this big ugly mess? Long story short, the more your Magicant shifts, the more your Space player is going to go completely nuts in that thing. They can "untangle" things with high-level Space freestyling, but good luck getting them to go near it to try. Not that you really need to- the front-end most players will see works perfectly fine.

>Doors left open will attempt to slam themselves shut before a shift occurs. Spooky! This behavior, though, gives rise to a highly useful trick. See, if a door doesn't shut correctly, the game will just leave that connection intact. Mostly this is to avoid cutting people or objects between doors in half- surprising that they actually caught that. But this lets you game the system, see, by placing long objects between doors so that they can't shut. And if they can't shut, they can't change, and I'm sure you see where this is going.

-Stabilizing your Magicant-

This glitch is dumb, right? It's dumb, who cares. And you want to do away with it, probably, so that you can navigate through the damn thing without tripping over snarls in the fabric of spacetime or more likely just getting kinda lost for a few minutes while trying to find a particular room. So, let's apply what we've learned: stick stuff in between the doors. You want something strong so it doesn't get snapped in half by the door slamming (it'll try a few times). More importantly, though, you want to make it so the door can't close.

The easiest way to do this is with a clamp of some description- stick something on the edge of the door so it can't go past the frame. And, uh, make sure it's big enough- otherwise the game might just splinter the doorframe, and...  
oh by the way don't break down the walls of the magicant that's a really bad idea, since it doesn't perform its little safety check in the wallspace and you could totally get bisected so yeah. The doors, similarly, only check the rotation angle of their hinges for safety, and removing them altogether will count them as permanently closed for the purposes of slicing up space.

Alternatively, you can tie the door handle to a bracket in a stud in the wall, or something- it slams pretty hard, so what you want to remember is that whatever you do to close it up needs to be able to withstand regularly being smashed at by wooden rectangles. Objects infused with the aspect of Law are heavy, but you'll want to bolt them to the floor so they don't slide. The downside of all this is that your magicant will periodically break out in a cacophony of slamming noises, which makes it hard to sleep or relax in there. If you want, you can let some doors close to make yourself a little rest area, but make sure you've got a Land exit in there because you don't want to be trapped in the one room that's not connected to anywhere else.

Speaking of Land exits, you unfortunately can't stabilize those properly. They'll change like anything else, and they use the game teleport protocol instead of magicant space-shifting so they're safe to move through. For ease of navigation, we rigged up these little LEDs and light-sensors on opposite sides of the magicant entrances, which would light up in different colors depending on destination. You can also tape light strips to the floor that connect to these, set up a color-coded navigation thing, but it's all fairly complicated and if you want to organize things, just figure something out. The Magicant's usually not that big, so finding a room inside when you know the layout's not really that difficult.

Anyway that's all there is to say on the matter. See you folks later.


	11. The Aspect of Heart: Hecka Crazy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I played a session as a Knight of Heart, and learned some pretty friggin' interesting things about the game's resident simple-power-gone-batshit-OP aspect.

So, okay. You know how on Captain Planet, there's these four kids with cool elemental powers, but then there's this one kid whose power is "Heart" and it doesn't do anything remotely useful? Well, in Sburb Heart is nothing like that.   
Instead, it's more like you are a magic wizard with the power to stick your hand into any object, rip out its essence (colloquially referred to as a Shiny), and manipulate it as you see fit. Like, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom-style, rip out someone's soul and do what you please to it, which would make it pretty scary even if it weren't the most OP ability in the game bar time travel. You can turn it into other stuff like a weapon or whatever temporarily using provided game abilities, but the real interesting stuff is what's inside- what the game thinks is important for representing something's "soul". It's kind of like looking at a really blurry class diagram for an object- you can see little bits and pieces of it, and tweak them and see how they relate to other things.   
  
See, people aren't the only things with "souls", which, aside from the whole bubble-afterlife thing and its lack of connection to the Shiny phenomenon, is a pretty firm nail in the coffin of the whole shiny = soul concept. It exhibits some characteristics of a soul, of course, being an abstract representation of someone's identity that doesn't have physical mass and can only be accessed with voodoo magic- but see, rocks also have shinies. As does practically everything that isn't a highly-protected game abstraction, like... well, technically like the Denizen, it's got this different thing that doesn't really count, but whatever that comes later.   
As a general rule, if it's big and important, its shiny is probably not safe to touch- something we discovered by testing instead of fear. There's "levels" of mastery, so to speak, which can be more or less directly measured. Try to grab a shiny of a higher "level" (which is kind of inaccurate because different things have different levels for different people and okay honestly it's a crapshoot) and it'll zap you and you won't be able to touch it. We had a kid who was so bad at this stuff he couldn't even do [Rose of the Noble Castle] until like halfway through the Dreaming Dead phase of the game.  
Anyway, right, everything has a Shiny. Except when it doesn't, maybe. The exceptions are few and far between, like SDs and some hecka Corrupted things. So, since every physical object has a Shiny, it stands to reason that every part of a physical object also has a Shiny. For example, if you take a log with a Log shiny, and split it in half with an axe, you get two half-logs with shinies that represent being Half-of-a-Log.  
  
MOLECULAR SHINIES  
  
See where I'm going with this? You can split things again and again, into smaller and smaller parts. That's reductionism, right there. It works on the tiniest splinters, the cells of wood pulp, all the way down to the atom. And then probably smaller, but I haven't worked out a subatomic Heart microscope yet. The game actually tracks metadata on EVERY INDIVIDUAL ATOM, which, okay, if you weren't scared of this thing already, now is a good time to start.  
Any Heart players who want to take a look at this stuff, I opened a satellite port on Lotus.Resources.ptowers.org/physics/shinyfuckery/microscope/HeartMicroscope.ccs and .../MicroscopeAssembly.pdf on the standard collection of first-order common alchemical reagents. Once assembled, you can either sink your own Heart pluck into it, or have your Space player charge the magnification systems, which is more efficient.  
Anyway, cool trick number 1 with these- you can break and form bonds with zero energy. Yes, zero energy. Or at least, the energy comes from and disappears to some game-handled container and you don't get to see it. Take two atoms or molecules, take one of their shinies and make it say "is single-bonded with X", and pow, they're bonded. We're working on a microscope adapter array, in order to use this trick to generate power by translating the same action into enough copies of the action to get enough energy out of the bonds for something useful.  
  
Cool molecule trick number two: shinies, if they're simple enough, can be superimposed on each other. "Simple enough" means, like, on the order of mathematically simple things like molecules, so you probably don't want to do this with larger objects unless they're heavily abstracted (player data, game structures). Notably, the shinies of polar molecules can be inverted, and placed on top of one another so that north occupies south and vice versa.  
And then it EXPLODES. Real good.  
I used this trick to reach the god tiers, but if you're quick and have access to teleportation, you can totally use Heart to nuke things. The same effect can be achieved by setting the abstract "stability" variable to near zero, but that usually ends up generating a whole lot of nuclear fallout and stuff, so yeah not a great idea.   
  
DENIZENS  
  
Okay, more fun stuff: You know [Rose of the Noble Castle]? That Heart shortcut ability that temporarily turns the raw form of the Shiny into a weapon? Well, it works on Denizens. Kind of. My Denizen personally wasn't up for it (fucking waldo-beth), but ganymedesGasp got along well enough with hers that it volunteered for experimentation. Apparently this is usually part of some quest line that requires a buttload of roleplay coefficient (more than the statistically viable coefficient spread among standard players, from measurements- people who've played the same aspect more than once, really). Anyway, while the Shiny the denizen hands over is hella phony (either that or so mod-protected that you can't even see inside it), [RotNC] works fine, and HOLY SHIT the weapon it produces is fancy as hell. Like, this thing is gigantic on a scale that'd make Final Fantasy heroes envious. Shame it doesn't actually work on the Denizen, but the thing can cleave goddamn mountains. Presumably. I cleaved an ogre, and also a good chunk of the floor, but whatever.  
  
HEARTLINES  
  
Okay, this is kind of interesting from a purely anecdotal standpoint- background first, though. You know [Heartlines]? Touchy-feely we-are-all-connected hippie feel-good bullshit, usually. Well, it has some... pretty interesting applications, actually. See, Heartlines is distance-simultaneous- that is, messages from Heartlines travel at infinite speed to their recipients, making message transfer into a matter of efficiently sending and decoding signals. Ordinarily, [Heartlines] is an emotional kind of thing, not suited to sending data- but if you take even a negligible fragment of someone's Shiny and construct a safe graft zone to your own, you can essentially turn the remaining shiny into a second node for the network.  
Now, there's a lot of problems with this- mainly, that the average session has no need for FTL communication, and there's a ubiquitous wifi signal making it all a moot point. Information transfer is fascinating, though, and with some cursory experimentation I found (confirmed through other Heart operatives) that you can seal off a little bit of someone's emotional processing and use it to interpret signals to send relatively complex messages. For any real powerful data transfer, you'd need to take control of more of someone's shiny than is really advisable given the mental cost, so hey nix on that aight?  
  
I'll be honest, though, this wasn't really my idea. It was really more of an attempt to recreate something done by this crazy megalomaniac Heart player who ran a multigalactic empire by enslaving alien species to act as living computers in her Heartlines network, and... really distasteful stuff, ingenuity aside. Anyway, encoding for simple data transfer over [Heartlines] and unused/safe shiny fragments to isolate and graft are available under Lotus.Procedures.ptowers.org/compsci/encoding/heartlines/, which I've just set to public. This is pretty much for use in the event of a Void cataclysm that blacks out usual comm channels- kind of a situational last resort thing.  
  
ROSE OF THE NOBLE CASTLE  
  
First things first- Lotus.Procedures.ptowers.org/shiny/rose_overwrite.pdf is public. This one's pretty fun- let's break down how it works. See, the shiny... it's like an onion, it's got layers. Or maybe it's like a planet, with a crust and a mantle beneath. Or maybe it's like a flower with petals or okay you know what, the metaphor that makes the most sense to you is the one you're going to have to use. But, basically, the data a shiny uses to represent itself AS a shiny- that is, as the pink ball of glow you actually see and touch- that stuff's all on the outside, like a wrapper to someone's real identity. That doesn't mean the outside's not important- to the contrary, it actually contains a host of useful metadata and provides a cheap way to peek at someone's top-level stats if you can figure out how it's arranged for the person in question.  
Anyway, one of the things you'll find on the outer layer of the shiny is the captcha code for someone's [Rose of the Noble Castle], the game ability that turns their shiny into a weapon. It can't be read by the human eye, but this is exactly the kind of situation the Intellibeam Laserstation was designed for. Even though haha whose bright idea was it to put a debug tool like this in the hands of the players, god damn I love that thing. Ordinarily, the Laserstation can't get a good read on the shiny- you'll want to shift its top-level representation from [feelings] to [crystal] first, and it should work fine from there as long as you can fit it under the beam (fragment it and reattach the pertinent part if you need to).  
  
Now, the captcha code here can be used to recreate the Rose in a physical form using alchemy, which is a neat trick. It doesn't have the raw emotion-powered strength of the real deal, but the Rose is by default balanced to work well with a player's existing combat style and specibus, so it makes decent mid-tier weaponry and is fairly cheap to upgrade through alchemy.  
That's not a big deal, though- what is a big deal is that the captcha code for the Rose itself isn't static. While it'll change and grow over the course of a player's personal development, that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is doing alchemy to someone's shiny- and yes, we've made sure that this particular process is SD-safe. The details of assembling and calibrating the machinery are in the pdf, but long story short- you do alchemy to the laserstation, make it capable of burning captcha codes into glass and crystal, and again turn the shiny to [crystal] state. Then you set up the new laserstation to edit the Rose's captcha code.  
Now, technically, you can turn this into anything, and it won't cost any grist- but of course it's not as useful as you'd think right off the bat. Firstly, if you shift it to a form the player doesn't have the specibus for, it's a no-go. It'll bypass specibus specialization balancing for specibi the player does have, though- if you've got jokerkind or one of the more general types (gunkind, bladekind, clubkind, plushkind), the Rose will be just as effective as someone using it with a tailored specibus. The big letdown is that it doesn't change the Rose's raw energy availability- there's a complex function detailed in the procedure PDF that relates weapon stats like flummoxie requirement, pluck cost, damage, and a host of status effects and secondary traits that all draw from the same "effectiveness" pool in different amounts.   
  
This, unsurprisingly, can be gamed like crazy. For example, a Rose with damage maxed at the expense of all other traits, contingent on things like flummoxie maximum and emotional durability (not QUITE a stat, but w/e) can reliably chip off about half the health bar of a DENIZEN. If you absolutely need to just make one of those guys be murdered and skip the quest rigamarole, get a few friends together, have them cast flummoxie and pluck buffs on you, and bring out their Roses for a coordinated takedown. Assuming the Denizen doesn't catch wise (tbh a big if), you can wipe that fucker off the face of the planet in five seconds flat.   
Did I mention I'm fucking awesome at this game?  
Anyway, max damage is pretty situational since at high values, the plu/moxie reqs skyrocket and the recipients start to take emotional penalties. On the other hand, trading damage and taking a few minor flaws is enough to let you stack loads and loads of the low-level status ailments and debuffs on that thing. While you need to recast the Rose every time you use it, people are going to be knocking your door down asking for a UU because of how easy it becomes to wreck bosses with these almighty soul-smiting dealies. Having you around to cast [Rose of the Noble Castle] is basically Easy Mode for your coplayers.  
  
THE SKAIAN SHINY  
  
Look. I don't... really know what I saw, or if I even actually saw it. As best I can recall, our Breath player tunnelled down to the core of the Battlefield, and I rappelled down there to try to study the Shiny of Skaia itself.  
It didn't exactly go well.  
I reached out for the spot it was supposed to be, but... I don't know whether it was the Battlefield, Skaia, or some defensive barrier around the both of them, but... I caught a glimpse of something before the core basically exploded with horrible zappy energy and put me in a coma for a couple weeks. Some kind of huge, impossible brilliance, which may have in retrospect been the explosion, but... if not. It wasn't a proper Shiny, whatever it was. I didn't get to touch it, or get a feel for much of anything. For a split second, I saw lines reaching outwards from the core, going into the walls of the battlefield, heading somewhere outside...  
and then I got blown away and almost died.  
But, uh, yeah. The game REALLY doesn't want me in there. This, as should come as no surprise, warrants further investigation.


	12. Replay Beds in the Veil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tricky, kind-of-risky alternative to the Door.

So, hey, problem numero 1: we're all stuck replaying this game, and it kind of sucks. The reason seems to be that when you go through the door, the "Continue" button doesn't work, and you have to hit "Replay Game" instead. We're working on fixing that, but in the meantime we've encountered a brand new way to be stuck in basically the exact same rut.  
  
You guys know the Veil, right? The game's dumping ground for unfinished content and weird technology, that gets fired towards Earth (or alien Earth-equivalent, because blah blah whatever cultural sensitivity) to cause an apocalypse for no good reason. Big huge asteroid belt between Derse and the Medium, full of weird labs and stuff. Well, there's a fun bit of unfinished content in there that provides an alternative to the usual door-replay.  
  
Basically, somewhere hidden in the veil (frequently behind weird space-time disturbances), you'll find a few meteor labs with beds in them. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like ectoslime tanks and monitors and buttons and tubes? But it's not really that complicated. You turn a key, press a button, and it all runs itself. Essentially, this is a backup replay system, in case your session's barren and you need to get out without Scratching or whatever. You get to pick your aspect (sometimes, sort of) for the new session, and your dwelling spire is a copy of the most recent home you replayed into.  
  
Let's go over the process of using these things, before we get into what happens when you do. There's two distinct phases, none of which are terribly complicated:  
  
SLEEPING

  
This is probably the easiest step- actually sleeping in a bed to replay- and it's the only one you're responsible for if you want to use the bed yourself.  
Firstly, in order to work the machinery, you'll need to get a Spirograph Key from one of the queens. Basically like a round disc with a raised spirograph teeth on the bottom- well, it's not teeth, it's like... the solid where ??? = f(x,y) is the spirograph function, and z is a range a couple inches long. Like a play-doh mold, like, it fits into a spirograph-shaped groove. Like, one of those baby puzzles where you put the triangle into the triange-shaped hole, only it's a spirograph instead of a solid triangle? Look, you know what I mean, it shouldn't be this hard to describe what this looks like. Whatever.

  
Anyway, you gotta get the key. The Prospitian queen will just hand it to you if you promise to give it back (only reason to do so is -carapace rep, only reason not to is you like to hoard shiny objects), while you'll need to do one of Jack's Heist-type sidequests to snatch it from the Dersite queen. Once you have it, you need to take it to the terminal in the lab.

  
The lab's main terminal has a bunch of stuff- a keypad (totally superfluous as far as I know), a big blue transportalizer button, and more importantly a slot for you to turn the key. Thj;ere's an arrow that should point toward a picture of the cursor for your session on the right, and a question mark-shaped cursor in the same position on the left. Next to the key-dial thing are a couple frog-shaped indicator lights, which are just as superfluous as the keyboard really. Above the whole setup is a display screen which shows your destination (more on that in a minute), and most importantly an Aspect ideograil.  
  
You might think "oh, hey! now that i know about this, i can replay into my favorite aspect over and over!" Well, unless your favorite aspect is Space, you're probably going to be shit out of luck. The average session only has one or two of these stations, if any- since they're usually well-hidden, it's hard to tell if you're in one of the many sessions without these, or if you just can't find it. And while one is usually Space, for reasons I'll try to explain later, you usually won't have too many options. The only plus is that you'll know what you're in for, to be honest. Only not really because you can't pick a title with this, so yeah.  
  
Anyway, slot the key into the dial, turn the switch to the question mark shape, hit the blue button, and then go into the other room and lie down on the bed. You'll fall unconscious, the machinery will go nuts, slime tanks will fill up, and then you disappear.  
  
SUMMONING

  
This is from the other side- you'll have replayed into a session that lacks a player, and some player will have been assigned the Duty of handling your entry. It's kind of like ectobiology, only it's super easy and you can do it even if you don't have the Duty going on. This Duty-bound player will (hopefully) successfully wake you up from your sleep, by doing some stuff. If you get involved in time stuff, you could be your own wake-up call, and it's recommended to try to do that in order to make sure your awakening is necessary to the alpha.  
The first thing the player will need to do is get a copy of the queen's key, just like for sleeping. They'll need it to turn the dial on their end from [question mark] to [session cursor] in order to "summon" you into the session. Then they press the button, the lab goes nuts, and you show up asleep on the bed in the other room.

  
The other room is the fun part, now. It's the same every time, mostly- a featureless gray room with a bed, the three pieces of entry equipment, the pre-punched card, and a bunch of crap in a closet. The closet is basically your suite of options for prototyping- a whole bunch of maimed plush toys. You'll want to hope your summoner does NOT prototype the weird gold-toothed ventriloquist dummy with the spear through its chest, nor the stuffed cartoon clown, and especially not the marker-defaced squiddle plush. Anything else is fair game, although I recommend the blue-haired doll with its arm torn off, to cripple and embarrass your foes. And wow, I'm being really bad with mixing up "you" and "they" but yeah there's the person who summons and the person who sleeps.

  
Since this location is in the session, by the way, this means that, yes, there is a pre-entry sprite that can get filled with things from inside the game. And while if someone's going to go to the trouble of taking some crazy game abstraction to the veil, they could also take it to Earth via meteor, it's still a hazard and seriously just prototype the doll, it's safer. (Note: Prototyping an imp, the only game thing we tried, doubled hit points and attack power for imps only, while glitching out the AI of and crippling several higher-level monsters.)

  
Anyway, this is just like regular entry, only without a time limit. No big. Only, when you break the entry item, you'll be warped to the player's new room and Land along with them, and they'll wake up. If they're a horrible person, they'll push you out the window for no good reason.  
  
By the way, when you spawn on your new planet, it's going to be missing most of its gates, save the last one. And more importantly, you're not going to have a server or client player. While the person whose duty it was to wake you up will serve as both "server" and "client" for purposes of game identification, you won't be a part of the normal session chain. In fact, while your coplayers' planets will be in a ring around Skaia, yours will be at the same radius, but oriented "above" or "below" Skaia taking the planet ring as horizontal. So, getting to and fro from your planet will be something of a hassle- you'll need a ship or a player-created portal or a magicant link.  
  
So that's that. But. There's kind of a risk involved. Unlike ectobiology and some other duties... retrieving your player from the Veil isn't strictly necessary to the timeline. In fact, since the server/client chain is intact, it's theoretically possible that the player assigned the Duty could choose not to complete it. And... you'd just never wake up. And then, regardless of whether they win, you'd either get shot towards Earth or Alternia or whatever in a flaming fireball, or stay there until session decay kills you. We lost contact with some of the players who opted to try the beds, and we're not sure whether it was just ordinary losing-contact-after-a-session, or...  
  
Well. It's a risk. If you're out of options, you can try to escape a failed session with these. And in using them, you're doing a valuable service to players whose sessions have a player imbalance. But... yeah.  



	13. yeah no

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> apparently everyone fuckin hates this so i'm done

no more sc or anythin not like he fits with everyone's extremely important headcanons


End file.
